The Chalet School

[ShellacB]

There seem to be plenty of old Chalet School Threads, but I can't find a current one.

In the middle of a re read. I have just finished the Tyrolean and Herefordshire ones. I loved them!

I do remember the Swiss books not being quite of the same quality, so not sure whether to read them all.

Could anyone recommend the best Swiss books if I was to skim through?

And the triplets are about twelve and in the Fifth!

So at this stage the nursery is David, Sybil, Peggy, Rix, Bride, Jacky and Primula Mary. All of whom see to be 5 and under? And this is late 30s? (Obviously EBD didn't need to tie ages to years at this point)

Now I'm even more confused. I'm reading New Chalet School... from Faded Page, the second half of which is what my 2000ish copy of United Chalet School.

That’s the original book. Armada split it in half for some reason.

Joey making Polly Heriot draw up some kind of history chart with dates, events and illustrations, which EBD clearly thought was very zany and modern and down with the kids.

It probably was in 1936.

Armada split Genius too, I think - but not Exile, which would have been the obvious one. They cut out a whole chapter of Exile though, as I recall.

I think that's why she had to invent Inter V, otherwise they'd have been in 6th form before they hit puberty! It does seem like timetabling would be an absolute nightmare, but I've no idea how things were normally done in private schools at that time.

Do people say Inter-Vee or Inter Five? I think I hear it as Inter-Vee in my head, but logically, that makes no sense!

I say Inter Vee. It's a throwback to when I first read the books and hadn't properly understood the use of Roman numerals for form numbering. (I should have, we were taught Roman numerals at Primary school.)

I'm the same! I know it should be Inter Five, but when I'm reading it doesn't come out that way.

I remember my mum reading one of the books to me and she was getting confused about what "in Va" was. She's an English graduate and was always an excellent reader, so there must just have been something about it that wasn't immediately obvous!

I am reading Peggy of at the moment and laughing at the inconsistencies in ages etc.

Tom Gay arrived at the Chalet school three years ago yet in Three Go to a year beforehand the triplets have aged at least five years from the book Tom goes to the Chalet School. They were three there and they are at least nine by Peggy goes to even though we are told Tom started school three years beforehand in Peggy of.

Also Lavender Leigh just seems to disappear after all of the build up to her character in Lavender laughs at. We are just told in this one that she has left school early having barely been mentioned in a book since.

Weren't Tom, Rosalie and even Gay Lambert etc of a similar age to Peggy Bettany originally?!

Agree with the comments on Dick and Mollie's departure in Jo returns. The whole concept of the Bettanys leaving their children for that long is unfathomable now. Ditto Mollie's being expected not to even be upset

I remember my mum reading one of the books to me and she was getting confused about what "in Va" was. She's an English graduate and was always an excellent reader, so there must just have been something about it that wasn't immediately obvous!

And then there was Vi Lucy. With Lucy also being a Christian name, that confused me. (I was no more than ten at the time.)

I forgot how wordy the books are; after re-reading them, I found myself skipping large chunks of them because of very long descriptions: some of them make Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix look short. Sometimes I've dipped into a book because of an exciting happening near the end, and then had to read through the long and tedious "scene setting" which many of the books begin with.

And Joey herself sends the school a huge missive, probably a dozen pages, and the staff comment on how long it is. By the time Joey has about eleven children, I get irritated by how "perfect" she is, and hero-worshipped by everybody else.

"Quoth Jo" makes me smile, though.

I often skip the descriptions of plays and school fetes

Oh God those Christmas plays! 🥱🥱

I'd forgotten about the magical curative powers of singing. Maybe the NHS can employ choirs?

As a child, I was charmed, though often a bit puzzled, by the early days of the themed sales — I didn’t know what a Peri was in the fairy tale sale, for one thing, and it all seemed like a lot of faff to get people to buy handcrafts and homemade sweets. I mean, I appreciate they had to put on a bit of a show to get parents etc to come from a distance, as there can’t have been many locals at the Tiernsee with money to spend on hand cut jigsaws or dolls’ house furniture! But given that the school sales aren’t school fundraisers (which was always what our school jumble sales etc were), but in aid of the San, as an adult it makes me wonder a bit about the funding and ethics of the San.

The San is Jem’s private business, right? The people he treats seem to be chiefly wealthy foreigners who can travel to spend potentially years over their cure, often sending their daughters to the CS into the bargain. Couldn’t a rich man running a very successful private clinic have funded some beds for local Tiernsee people with TB, too, without the school paying? Or would having a bunch of peasants under the same roof ruin the prestige of it all, and have people tutting about peasants and unsanitary, ill-ventilated conditions giving them TB?

Isn't it the free children's beds they are funding?

Not that much different to the schools Macmillan cake sales for example.

Yes, but why isn’t the San funding them? It’s a luxury private health clinic in a very poor, remote area of another country. Surely the optics alone would suggest they self-fund a number of public patients without the Hobbies Club having to do sweated labour on hand knitted baby clothes and leatherwork all winter?

I have just been pleasantly surprised by the ending of Peggy goes to the Chalet School in that a Christmas play happens, but there is no description of it.

Madge has just given birth to Kevin and Kester. Oddly so many of both Madge and Joey's pregnancies are shrouded in such secrecy. Okay I get how this one could have gone visibly undetected as she was in Canada, but that doesn't explain her not telling any of her family and friends!

When Sybil is born Joey has been staying with her all of a few weeks before the birth, yet somehow doesn't realise that she is pregnant.

When Joey has the triplets Madge seems to know, but everyone else seems shocked she has had a baby at all and I would imagine a triplet pregnancy would not be easy to conceal.

It seems to be something particular to Joey and Madge. Regularly other characters are mentioned as expecting a new arrival. Even Mollie Bettany mentions expecting a baby before going back to India at one point.

I know triplets were unexpected, but surely they must have suspected twins at least? Especially with all those doctors around.

People would be begging for euthanasia if I started singing to them

But isn’t it only Joey & the Robin who have that power?

Ooh, no, I love the descriptions. I may be overthinking, but it’s often the plotty bits I have trouble with, so unrealistic, and I can’t always work out why we’re supposed to like certain characters so much, or why some actions are harmless fun, while others are beyond the pale.
Anyway, no reason why we all have to like the same things.

Yes, but why isn’t the San funding them? It’s a luxury private health clinic in a very poor, remote area of another country. Surely the optics alone would suggest they self-fund a number of public patients

You don't know that they didn't. EBD's core readership was girls aged around 10-14. She was going to focus on what would interest them.

When Joey has the triplets Madge seems to know, but everyone else seems shocked she has had a baby at all and I would imagine a triplet pregnancy would not be easy to conceal.

Robin knew, and Polly Heriot twigged. It was normal for girls' books of the time, though. In one of the Abbey books, Maidlin, aged fourteen, tries to get Joy to play tennis when Joy is in the later stages of a twin pregnancy, and it's clear she doesn't realise. (Though she grew up on a farm, so she shouldn't have been that clueless.)

I like most of the opening chapters where the new characters are introduced and their circumstances/problems (if any) set out. And the domestic scenes such as at the beginning of Bride, or in Lavender, when we see Miss Wilson off duty, reading a trashy novel and scoffing chocolates. (Where did she get them, I wonder, with rationing in force.)

I think that EBD’s favourite thing about her own series was the repetitive descriptions of dainty cubicles, the trilingualism system, the history of the school — she’s such a completist writer that you get the impression she’d happily have provided detailed descriptions of all cubicles in all dormitories in all school premises, if space allowed. Sometimes it gets the better of her, as when, in Joey goes to the Oberland, we get the exact details of who of her million children sits where in every car, train, cab etc taken from the moment they leave Plas Gwyn till the moment they arrive in Freudesheim!

It’s part of their appeal for me, just because it’s so mad! She does a good set piece, too in the earlier part of the series — staff evenings, sheets and pillowcases party, smowfights, mishaps that means a long walk or an overnight in a hut. But by the Swiss books, it’s fairly clear the Gornetz Platz is the dullest place in the world, and must be artificially enlivened with fireballs, criminal gangs, kidnappings, motorboats, lunatics stealing babies etc.

@HonoriaBulstrode, unless EBD said, it didn’t! It’s not like it was doing stuff she didn’t tell us about!